[Report on a training course for clinical research coordinators].

Recently, nurses and pharmacists have become to play important roles in clinical trials as clinical research coordinators (CRC). However, clinical laboratory personnel have a very few chances to contribute to such tasks. CRCs have responsibility to protect the human rights, to assure the safety of volunteers during studies, and to keep quality of data. One of the authors had a chance to participate in a training course for CRC that was held in Tokyo, 2004. In this paper, we report about the training course and roles of CRC. We also discuss how laboratory personnel should contribute to clinical trials.